Ever wonder how books were made before modern printers and computers? At PBS, you can see photos from Arion Press in San Francisco, which makes handmade books using letterpress printing equipment that’s centuries old. In honor of their 40th anniversary, Arion is printing Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with these traditional methods.

T. R. Hummer has a comely piece up on Slate, “The Intimacy of Walt Whitman’s ‘America,'” about the influence and pleasures of Walt Whitman, plus an alleged recording of Whitman reading lines from “America,” made by Thomas Edison:

A funny thing happened on the way to President Obama’s second inauguration Monday. The president’s speech and Richard Blanco’s poem got reversed.

Broadly speaking, one’s expectations of political rhetoric is that, at its worst, it reduces complex argument to slogans and platitudes or, at its best, that it singles out constituencies and individual citizens in order to focus on the day-to-day concerns that society can address.

A modern retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Chris Adrian’s new novel The Great Night explores love and death at an evening feast in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park.

“As those early days blurred into weeks, I watched my newborn son losing weight. How could it be that we did not know how to feed our son? Where was our midwife now? Why, in the middle of this enormous city, were we so isolated? We needed help. We were doomed. We’d always been doomed.” ...more

The stories in Mary Hamilton’s very, very short collection are vivid, surreal, experimental, funny, and emotionally devastating.

Whitman became a regular at Pfaff’s after getting fired from the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1859. The years before the Civil War were a decadent period where Whitman played the bon vivant, finding friends and lovers among the New York counterculture.

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